This is to notify you of the publication of
A Hubert Harrison Reader, edited with introduction and notes by Jeffrey B. Perry, Wesleyan University Press, 505 pp., 4 illus., 7 x 10, June 2001, paperback ISBN 0-8195-6470-2 $24.95, cloth ISBN 0-8195-6469-9 $70.00.
The St. Croix, Virgin Islands-born Hubert Harrison (1883-1927), known as "the father of Harlem radicalism," was a brilliant writer, orator, educator, critic, and political activist in New York in the 1910s and 1920s. Historian J. A. Rogers in World's Great Men of Color, refers to Harrison as "the foremost Afro-American intellect of his time" and (amid chapters on Booker T. Washington, William Monroe Trotter, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Marcus Garvey) emphasizes that "none of the Afro-American leaders of his time had a saner and more effective program." During the 1910s and 1920s Harrison, "the most class conscious of the race radicals and the most race conscious of the class radicals," was a major influence on A. Philip Randolph, Garvey, and a generation of World War I-era activists and "common people." The political and literary publications that he edited -- The Voice, the New Negro, the Negro World, and the Voice of the Negro -- were marked by "Poetry for the People" and "Book Review" sections. Harrison is one of the truly important, yet neglected, figures of early twentieth-century America.
This individually introduced and annotated collection of one hundred thirty-eight articles offers a first-time ever, comprehensive presentation of Harrison's writings on class and race consciousness, the labor movement, the New Negro movement, religion, education, politics, Black leadership and leaders, international events, Caribbean topics, the Virgin Islands, literature and literary criticism, and the Black theater. Historian Ernest Allen, Jr., emphasizes that this work will "change the way we tend to look at Black thought generally in this period."
The book is distributed for Wesleyan University Press by the University Press of New England and a catalogue description and ordering information are available at www.dartmouth.edu/acad-inst/upne/0-8195-6470-2.html. A brief excerpt from the book's introduction is available at www.dartmouth.edu/acad-inst/upne/harrisonex.html.
Posted: 12 July 2001